Although mobile networks seek to minimize signaling overhead and user equipment power consumption, overhead signaling and its associated power are especially an issue with small data transfers, such as machine-type communication devices and smartphones generating background traffic. Because the small data transfers represent a relatively small amount of data per burst, there is a high signaling overhead with respect to the amount of data transported in each burst. To minimize the signaling overhead in this type of irregular traffic, mobility information and traffic pattern information may be used to determine whether to release a connection or keep the user equipment in connected mode. Mobility information may also be used when trying to determine the offloading possibilities in a network including a heterogeneous network (for example, whether to handover the user equipment to a small cell for traffic offloading or whether it to keep the user equipment connected to a macro cell).
In Third Generation Partnership (3GPP) specifications, reporting of user equipment mobility information at the connection setup may be provided. Specifically, the user equipment may report an indicator of an availability of visited cell history, and report the mobility state estimation (MSE). This also allows the network to retrieve the visited cell history. The visited cell history may include cells visited while the user equipment was in an idle mode, time of stay, and physical cell identifiers of the visited cells, and the like.